Menu

Category Archives: Indie Mags

The stories surrounding tennis

Just as the Wimbledon tennis tournament ended this year, Stack posted Racquet magazine through my door. The 4th issue of Racquet, a US quarterly independent magazine, focuses on American tennis players and gives a fascinating insight into some of the most well-known champions’ careers.

Racquet is perfectly pitched whether you’re a tennis lover, or you don’t know much about the sport. Issue 4 of the magazine has a phenomenal wrap around cover photograph of Roger Federer winning his 5th crown at Indian Wells. The detailed photography and attention to layout continues throughout the issue.

This magazine isn’t one that I would normally pick up, but really enjoyed reading. We live close to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club where the Wimbledon tournament is held. Every year, where we live in South West London explodes in ‘Wimbledon Fever’. The streets are decked out in green and purple flags. Our local pubs sell Pimms on tap. When we walk to the station in the morning, the roads are full of Wimbledon cars with blacked out windows. The buzz of the tennis tournament dominates our area, and it’s easy to get swept up in the excitement.

It was brilliant to read beyond the headlines of the sport and uncover some fascinating details about tennis that I never knew before. Getting to know more about Venus and Serena Williams’ incredible careers. Finding out about Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe’s road to fame. Tennis is a huge spectator sport in Britain, and it’s heartwarming to discover that across the ocean in America, Racquet is just as passionate.

‘We can share a new story of what it means to be alive at this time. A story that will unleash human potential instead of drowning it in a sea of anxiety and cynicism.’Editor’s letter, Positive News issue 88

Doesn’t it feel like we’re in an endless cycle of news? I don’t know about you but I feel stuck amongst divisive voices, all clamouring to tell me what’s happening in the world from their perspective. I feel compelled to be informed, and want to be interested. Lately though, I’m exhausted and dispirited hearing about the world around me. Perhaps it’s the political times we’re living in, but it’s not helped by the unrelenting negativity in the mainstream news.

Positive News is a uplifting read whether you feel bombarded by the news or not. It doesn’t soothe readers with frivolous stories about rescued puppies, but validates concerns. It covers some of the most alarming and uncertain situations that we’re collectively facing, just from a positive position. The housing crisis becomes an article about floating homes; the rise of fascism is instead a piece on how to move beyond political division in society; India’s women suffering from gender injustice is reported on from the angle of the people who have benefited from a creative education programme designed to educate women on gender inequality.

Whilst it doesn’t break the boundaries of the form of an independent magazine, Positive News breaks the boundaries of journalism. Instead of feeling paralysed by the news, reading Positive News I felt unusually empowered.

Anyone feeling angry? I sure am. Trump, Theresa May, Brexit, the widening gap between rich and poor… there’s a lot to be angry about now. Anxy magazine’s The Anger Issue hit the shelves at just the right time.

Anxy magazine is a project funded by Kickstarter backers, based in California. It aims to smash the stigmas around mental health, with The Anger Issue as the first issue. A whole magazine issue focused solely on anger, undisguised by other themes, feels rare and bold; anger is a controversial emotion that our society allows us to feel (sort of) but rarely express openly and vocally.

Anxy looks at many different forms of anger, and the affect on our mental health in bottling it up, or in not understanding the source of our rage and taking action.

We’re given a close up view of Kate Speer’s journey from psychiatric hospitalisation to recovery, driven by anger at medical professionals’ failure to rehabilitate her into society themselves. The anger of Turkish Kurds, living ‘like refugees’ in their own country. Retail employees’, restaurant managers’ and hospital nurses’ experience of having people’s anger directed at day after day. And Margaret Atwood’s advice for those who feel driven to anger at the state of current events.

I had assumed that the sheer amount of anger in Anxy would overwhelm me, and perhaps even increase my own anger. But it was cathartic. Reading others’ experiences of anger helped me feel less alone with my anger and removed some of the shame attached to the emotion.

Healthy expressions of anger are marginalised, with women expected to contain and diffuse their anger, and men’s typical outlets being anger and aggression, so I was particularly relieved to read ‘Gaslighting: A Hate Story’, ‘Between the Binary’ and ‘Removing the Mask of Masculinity’ probing into the binary gulf in gendered experiences of anger.

The writing within Anxy is human, compassionate, rage-fuelled and frustrated. Anxy forced me to take a heavily critical look at society’s inability to incorporate anger into an emotional spectrum, untarnished by shame. I cannot wait for the second issue.

The beginning of this post signals that the wedding has happened! I am married and I am overjoyed that I have more time for reading independent magazines again, and writing about them!

Illustoria is a magazine for creative kids and their grownups. But even as a grownup without kids, I fell in love with the simple story-telling approach Illustoria bring to nuanced concepts like friendship, determination and loneliness. The Californian based magazine is published quarterly, having been founded in summer 2016.

Issue 3, Outside-In, had a surprise on every page: comics, DIY ideas, and book recommendations, all with beautiful eye-catching illustrations. This is a magazine you want to spend time with, pore over, and return to time and again. It made me wish I had a little person to share it with. The little person I was would have adored Illustoria, and still does!

The lateness of this review doesn’t reflect how quickly I read issue 2 of Phox Pop* magazine; it was devoured within a couple of days over Christmas. (Lack of natural light and knee-deep wedding planning conspired to keep me from blogging!)

Phox Pop is a well researched, engaging and beautifully designed magazine. It defies easy categorisation into a broad independent magazine theme. Instead, Phox Pop is driven by curiosity; the website simply states Phox Pop is ‘a free-range selection of stories’. Meticulous research has gone into every page, bringing together tenuous topics such as the origin of the banana; urban geodes; and how to become a wine god/dess. Since when did multicultural Australian identity sit easily with monarch butterfly migration? Each page turn leads to more detailed and fascinating facts, as delightful as they are intriguing.

Phox Pop is created by Amy Freeborn, who has a background in newspaper journalism, digital publishing and editing. With Phox Pop she says that she ‘made the magazine that I would want to write for, and read, myself: rather than pitching ideas to multiple other titles, I would write them all for my own title, and hope that other people would be as interested in reading them as me.’

I love that issue 2 of Phox Pop hasn’t been moulded into a theme; that the topics are diverse. It feels like a labour of love, as if any interesting facts that Amy has heard, seen or experienced have been plucked and polished for Phox Pop. They are much shinier and engrossing facts than skim reading the same information on Wikipedia due to personal stories that root the research; from female astronauts to hunters of render ghosts – reading about their lives widens our own world.

*So where does the name Phox Pop come from? It comes from the phrase ‘vox pop’ an abbreviation of a Latin phrase that means ‘voice of the people’. The ‘v’ has been replaced with ‘ph’ from the Greek ‘phos’ (light) to indicate different art forms.

Just before Rogue One, the newest Star Wars film, was released in December, Little White Lies released an a special Star Wars colour-in edition. The joy of colouring in never really leaves you when you grow up, and it was lovely to have the time (and excuse!) to get out a fistful of colouring pencils and imagine what the final film might look like.

I’m a Star Wars fan by proxy. All of the times I’ve watched the films it’s been with my cousins, brother or my fiancé, who have been real enthusiasts of the series. I’ve enjoyed all of the recent films in the cinema, but I’d be hard pushed to explain the intricacies of the plot! Thankfully, Little White Lies took a broader look at where Rogue One fits in to the Star Wars series. A profile of Felicity Jones’ career (remember her from Chalet Girl days?) and an article about how her character, Jyn Erso, continues a cinematic tradition of tough women who take action made me pretty excited about the upcoming movie.

Did you see Rogue One? Are you a colouring-in fan? If both answers are yes then get yourself a copy of the Little White Lies Star Wars colour-in edition if you haven’t already!

A few weeks ago I wrote about reading frankie, an Australian independent magazine whose summery pages helped make the UK winter feel a little less severe. Recently it’s been so dull and grey outside that another trip down under, this time with Peppermint magazine, has helped to brighten things up!

Peppermint is an Australian quarterly magazine, focused on natural living and sustainability. I picked up a copy of issue 30, as I was drawn to the tranquil beach cover photo! Inside, I loved the feature about THINX, underwear designed to be more ecologically friendly than tampons, and a profile on Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Muslim immigrant activist who co-founded Youth Without Borders, works on an oil rig, and is an amazing role model for young Muslim women.

Although, at times, Peppermint felt slightly too ‘old’ for me to be reading, I really appreciated the age range of the women Peppermint represented and the variety of different crafts and projects that had been written about so passionately.

The white spaces in Peppermint’s pages reflect their natural living ethos. The magazine is pitched at women in their mid-twenties to thirties and most likely with young families, due to a focus on family-run independent businesses, whether that be a husband and wife couple, or with idea-generating kids involved! Although, at times, Peppermint felt slightly too ‘old’ for me to be reading, I really appreciated the age range of the women Peppermint represented and the variety of different crafts and projects that had been written about so passionately.

I am so glad that I’ve been able to buy such dynamic independent magazines from the other side of the world here in England, however disorientating it is seeing a brand in an Australian magazine and thinking ‘Perhaps I’ll buy that!’, only to realise that the shipping costs would be astronomical!

I’m in denial about it being autumn; I miss the long sunny evenings of summer and Christmas is not quite near enough to get excited about yet. So when I picked up a copy of frankie, an Australian independent magazine, and found that it was infused with the down under excitement of ‘summer is just round the corner’, it was the best antidote to the cold, dark pre-Christmas days in Britain. continue reading →

From the moment I opened Ladybeard magazine and read the first page, I knew it was a magazine I wanted to continue reading:

We platform the voices you won’t hear in women’s magazines; voices of the people who live any and every deviation from the straight, white, cis, able-bodied ‘ideal’. Working in themed issues, we open up old topics to vital new perspectives.

We are feminist but we are not just for women. We want to play with gender, sexuality and identity, rather than dictate their terms.

This begins with our name: Ladybeard.

The second issue of Ladybeard focuses on the mind. Some parts of the magazine are about things I easily associate with the mind; mental health; depression; anxiety; dementia, the deterioration of the mind with old age. Others are less obvious. Google it? The New Mind Control by Robert Epstein was a piece that particularly stood out for me. It gives an alarming perspective of what 21st century developments in technology will do for privacy and control. Likewise, I was struck by The Veil, as it revealed perspectives I wasn’t expecting to encounter. The piece explores the experiences of 3 women and their reasons for wearing a headscarf or niqab. One of the women interviewed came from a middle-class Christian family and it massively challenged the presumptions I held of women who cover their heads. Believing the practice to have formed through male control, to learn that others feel it offers safety and psychological distance from the male gaze was strangely uncomfortable. It was odd to realise that, although I am aligned with these women in believing that they shouldn’t face discrimination for wearing a headscarf, I hadn’t examined their reasons for wearing one very deeply. I learnt more about my own mind than theirs in the article.

No matter what angle they write from, every piece Ladybeard have printed is meticulously researched and presented, whether it’s experiences, stories, historical outlooks or scientific discoveries. Many independent magazines print beautiful photographs of the cities and environments they write about, yet Ladybeard have chosen, perhaps partly due to their inward focused subject matter, to illustrate most of the magazine in bold, colourful abstract patterns. The magazine’s artwork is some of the best I’ve ever seen.

Ladybeard is thick, and I mean thick; this is a magazine that real time and energy has gone into creating. The first issue focused on sex, and was published nearly a year before the Mind issue. Already, the Ladybeard team have announced the their third issue will be about beauty. These are all topics that are hugely important to explore from a feminist perspective.

If you want to hear more about how the Mind issue of Ladybeard was created then I suggest you give their interview with Stack a listen. I went along to the event, hosted by Stack, which was a brilliant way hear from the creators behind the magazine. Frustratingly, the interview at the event didn’t record, but Steve faithfully re-recorded it with the Ladybeard team.

Flow dedicate themselves to paper. Not only do they publish a magazine eight times a year, but they also produce a yearly calendar, diary and Flow special books about specific topics like mindfulness. Based in the Netherlands, alongside their Dutch publications, they also make four English editions of the Flow magazine every year. I’ve been eyeing up their Flow Book for Paper Lovers for a long time (all those paper possibilities!) but decided to test the waters first with their latest issue of Flow magazine in English, issue 14.

Flow magazine has a similar tone to magazines such Oh Comely and Betty; creative; inspiring; focused on the art of slowing down; and filled with illustrations and ideas. Their travel section focuses on little-visited places with, such as Albania. It was great to discover some long-read pieces in Flow, such as ‘Small, Smaller, Smallest’ where practical advice and perspectives are offered to readers about the conundrum of the grass is always greener. It felt like the advice column response that would never be published in mainstream media; the advice that a real friend would give.

Alongside brilliant content, Flow play around with form: different sizes and thicknesses of paper have been inserted throughout the magazine, making the magazine feel like an introduction to their special books. About half-way through there’s an art journalling section to encourage readers to grab a pen or pencil and get creative. It’s lovely to have the space dedicated to artwork, rather than just ideas of creative things to do later. Not only is Flow a fantastic magazine for paper lovers, but they cover a wide range of ideas insightfully with an artistic focus. Far from feeling left out (I am not a natural born artist!) the magazine has inspired me to be more creative in my everyday life. Art journalling here I come..!